First, here’s something the roofers used to clean up. They had left a lot of stuff in our garage to pick up after the finish carpentry is all done. They encouraged us to use this gizmo, which is a magnetic sweeper. The idea is that it will pick up nails, staples, and other ferrous-metal scrap from the ground. When you have enough collected, you can pull up the small handle and the scrap should fall off the bottom.

We ran it along the first fifty feet or so of the driveway and all around the house. It made a nice clicking sound every time a nail or staple jumped up and stuck on it, but it turned out that there were fewer things stuck to it than there had been clicks. It seemed that as you ran the sweeper over more grass the nails would dislodge and click back on. We did pick up several handfuls of nails and staples with it, though, even after the roofers had gone over everything.

Then there was a yard sale that we stopped at, along the top of the ridge on Mayberry Hill Road. The people at the preschool had told us that we could walk up the field on the other side of the property that was holding the yard sale, so we wanted to talk to the people there to see if it was all right to walk there anyway. I saw a box of stamps for tooling leather, a complete alphabet set, and got that. Then my eye fell on a bandsaw. I’ve been wanting one for cutting up turning stock. It’s a lot safer than a table saw for that application because it doesn’t kick back or throw cutoff wood across the room. The guy who was selling it said he had bought it new but never used it. It took a lot of fiddling with before it was ready to go. The blade needed to go back on the wheels, one wheel needed a friction belt to drive the blade (I used some non-slip material like drawer lining stuff), the upper wheel needed to be reconnected to the tension adjustment knob, and every possible adjustment needed to be readjusted. It still needs to be bolted down, or lagscrewed down, to the workbench before I’m going to saw any wood on it.

I think this is as small a bandsaw as they come. At any rate, it takes the smallest blade listed on a website of bandsaw parts.

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on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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